by Underground Panther in the Sky, Unknown News
March 22, 2005
"Unless"
Our culture hates a loser. It hates weak, sick, "defective" people. When a homeless person gets on the bus, watch the other riders -- they all cringe at him like they could catch poverty, alcoholism, BO or bad thrift shop fashion disease. Observe a crowd, when they see a person in a wheelchair, obviously disabled -- watch the people cringe and stare. Most people don't go up to the retarded person and greet them; we are taught to look away, ignore, patronize dehumanize. We are taught to not see the retarded as part of ourselves our own potential. And we refuse to think and realize that just one car accident, one case of meningitis, one brain tumor, or one prion-infected steak, or even just old age -- and we could be weak, disabled and dependant on others, just like him.
America hates victims. It shoots messengers if the message is about an abuser, exploiter, or protecting the weak from the strong. This sick abuse and denial dynamic plays out over and over in private homes, schools, institutions, and governments. And people suffer in silence because they are ashamed of weakness, disability, human confusion, and the effects of traumas and learned helplessness.
Eugenics is an American invention. Hitler made Eugenics Germany's national policy. "Good Germans" rationalized it, too. Hitler didn't begin by gassing Jews. No, he dehumanized them. He killed off the disabled first, and since the disabled are already dehumanized, it was easy for Nazis to kill them off with their utilitarian beliefs like survival of the fittest being so popular with the masses looking for scapegoats in the homeland.
There is a socio psychological war on the weak, on anyone who isn't "normal". It's a war on the handicapped, the mentally ill, the poor. It is being waged by the strong, the opportunists, the bullies, the rich, the powerful, and the sociopaths. It has been going on for millennia.
The Nazis killed off the disabled, the retarded and mentally ill people first. Along with the anti Nazi insurgents. People like Terri Schiavo were the first to die. And people like me -- I have a mental illness and I am anti-fascist... I would be among the first round of the dead in Nazi Germany. Before the Gypsies and Jews, I would die.
Nobody who was able-bodied noticed the slaughter of the disabled brain-dead people. They could not cry out, their families were shamed. The disabled had no success stories, they were helpless and produced nothing of value to Germany. They were useless eaters, a burden on the utilitarian utopia of Hitler's Aryan nation. They all had to be killed for the health of the state!
The disabled and those who do not produce enough are in effect throwaway people, to top down competitive cultures like ours, with an internalized elitism expressed by this sociopath pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps "ethic" and contrasted with success stories/Horatio Alger type myths. The disabled are resented for being weak by the strong. But nobody says it out loud. Until the culture faces stress or certain sociopathic kinds of people have political power ...
What people say today, "good Germans" said before, when arguing to kill off the disabled. Terri Schiavo is a vegetable, she can't feel pain, so it's OK to starve her to death. Let us be rid of her, because she will never have a quality life. Quality, of course, is always defined by normals. They are concerned about her quality of life for themselves, they are fighting for the health of the state. Good Germans.
So many people are so concerned about Terri's quality of life they'll gladly starve her to death, unsure of whether she will feel pain or not, and call it "mercy".
They are so cocksure they will not get brain damage, they'll pass laws on her life that may come to interfere with their life if they should be disabled. They may feel very differently when they are subjected to what they thought was mercy, when they were able-bodied.
But the unspoken side of all this is... Terri takes up a room. She drains bank accounts dry, she taxes her family's emotions. Her life costs something. Other people have to maintain her life for her. The state helps her. She takes up time, employees, space, and liquid feed, and all that a more able-brained person could use for their potential chance for recovery.
How much is Terri's life worth? If she is starved, she has the status of a throwaway person. A German Nazi victim. She is helpless to say No, don't kill me.
The able-bodied cry that she'd be dead if "the miracle of medicine" wasn't keeping her here. And that miracle of science saves a lot of able-bodied people too. If they were left to die, or science couldn't patch them up as well, they'd be Terri Schiavo.
Remember, Ronald Reagan would have died much sooner if we would have let nature take its course with him. We don't know what kind of vegetative states Reagan was in; they kept him out of the public eye. We never debated removing his feeding tube. Why not?
Why is this person nobody knows the epicenter of this debate? Why is it not a national figure? Is it because the sentimental factor might interfere with the dehumanizing of the weak? The whole hidden political reason it's Terri, whom nobody knows, and not Reagan or some other famous person wasting away who's in the spotlight?
Another Point: Science always tries to tell us who can and cannot feel pain. It's a very convenient notion to draw a line determining whose suffering hurts and whose doesn't. Do we have to care or not? Where is the line drawn?
Sometimes scientists act like a bully who's caught abusing a kid, as he tries to convince the authority figures who could punish or restrain him. He claims with such expertise, his victim must be blowing the abuse and pain all out of proportion to reality. The bully claims, I only tapped him, he's weak, a crybaby. The bully always has an interest in minimizing his victim's voice of suffering, and telling people that pain does not hurt. Utilitarian beliefs are the salve to numb empathy for people on behalf of a bully state...
Who's voice is missing in the Terri Schiavo case? The victim's voice, Terri Schiavo's voice. So her parents fight for her, because they love her and do not want her to suffer. They are by proxy the person who FEELS the pain for Terri who cannot scream.
Her family is like the Lorax, in the Dr. Suess tale, who speaks for the trees ... for the trees have no tongues as the once-lers turn the truffala trees into sneeds they think everyone needs ...
And the scientists know the able-bodied don't want to bother with Terri or the costs of this messy reality until their lives are made a mess. Let's hope there is a Lorax looking out for them.
Scientists and bullies both have made mistakes on the pain issue before. Politicians and the public together created the Holocaust and genocide on all kinds of people declared inferior. They've done it before, they're doing it again.
It was once thought fish could not feel pain, but it turns out they do. It was thought that babies could not feel pain either, so operations were done on infants without anesthesia, because it was widely believed babies lacked the ability to feel pain like we do. Turns out science was wrong again.
Terri will not feel being slowly starved. She may or may not feel it. And it's OK to starve Terri, even though her family loves her, and she is a human being, and we shudder if we had to live like her, because of ... why?
Terri Schiavo is not your daughter. You are not Terri. And yet people who do not know her can in effect hold her life in their hands.
Starvation as "mercy"
When criminals are sentenced to death, we give them lethal injections. We are all so concerned that we not be cruel to them. We give sick, dying dogs lethal injections so they will not feel their bodies in the worst states of sickness. We abort fetuses ASAP, so they will not grow brains to feel the abortion procedure and just to be sure both mother and fetus are numb through it all.
Why do we do this? Could it be empathy and utilitarianism, both working on a complicated personally agonizing case-by-case situation? A decision that cannot be accomplished in a sound byte.
Why do we not give this kind of quick numb death to Terri, that we grace convicted death row child killers and rapists with?
Is it because, to deliberately inject an innocent grown woman with drugs that would kill her fast looks and feels like murder?
Maybe it's because that's what it is.
Yanking out Terri's feeding tube and letting her starve -- that too is murder, and it may be torture too. How is torture and murder mercy? When lethal injection is quick and painless?
No matter what we believe about her capacity for feeling pain, our beliefs don't make it so. We believed fish could not feel pain once, we believed babies could endure surgery without anesthesia too. But it turns out science was wrong. And we are going to risk torture to get Terri out of our sight?
Why all the rush to be rid of Terri? Is it because she takes up space, drains bank accounts, uses up employee time, why? What is so evil about her existence that it must end right now? Kill the helpless, they are a drain on the economy! The brain-dead must go, they aren't productive enough to live???!! Productive for whom? Her family loves her, enough to fight for her empty life.
So who are we to yank her feeding tube and torture her because our scientists (who also cut the vocal chords of animals they vivisect to remove their own capacity to feel compassion for tortured animals) believe "a consensus of experts" that she can't feel pain?
Are they Terri? No, so how can they say?
And why not give her a lethal injection instead of risking torture on top of death?
Why are people not discussing this option?
Too Hitleresque? Too close to the truth?
Are you willing to let a nation of able-bodied people possibly torture a helpless woman who cannot cry out? Are you telling yourself she can't feel, because she's brain dead? Science is not all that good at empathy ... and neither is our culture.
It's kinda sick, the idea of lethal injection is not discussed here because it looks like what it is, murder or "ghoulish". But the silent torture of slow starvation is OK as long as the victim does not cry out or complain. She is sorta like people in the third world, people we starve so CEOs can make profits and we get "jobs." The victims of "economic development" that we never hear about, so it's almost like they don't feel it.
Once in a while there is a Live Aid show, or some protests. Funny how this silent starving, silent torture issue in the third world in some ways is so similar to Terri's plight. Victims of abuse by the strong are unable to be heard, because maintaining the comforting beliefs about other people is more important to us than feeling real empathy for them where they are at.
It looks like in able-bodied America, no suffering is as important as your own. That's what matters most. And who is suffering in Terri's case, really? The hospital tired of tending her? A bank account? A corporation? A husband? Who?
Reagan had a slow death and no-one dared debate yanking his feeding tube out and starving him to death. Why not? He lived as a vegetable, he was kept out of the public eye. Reagan was "permitted" his time of brain-dead weakness, because he was of a certain rich and famous class that is not to be thrown away.
Terri is not an idol to the rich like Reagan was. She is another person like me or you who is weak, a citizen turned throwaway. She will be starving to death because we able-bodied don't want her here, taking up our time, our space. We tell ourselves we are so merciful to her, and because the experts tell us it's OK, we can so easily believe she can feel no pain,. Listen to the experts with stunted empathy, trying to tell us it's OK to starve the weak who cannot scream to death. It smacks of eugenics, to me.
Terri just has no more potential to be used or exploited. She can't give anyone pleasure by existing now. Her time is up, the strong able-bodies say. Time is money.
America is full of hypocrites, cowards, bullies and posers when it comes to actually facing the ugliness of our human condition and the frailty of a quality life and bodily weakness and the need sickness imposes upon us, or the disabilities that can happen to all of us.
Here is another side of the Terri Schiavo case nobody talks about:
Many soldiers coming back from Iraq now are brain-damaged. Some have become like Terri, due to "better armor" that protects the body but not the head. And we don't see these soldiers -- they are overflowing Army hospitals ... And Bush cuts veterans' benefits and veterans' health care to buy more hi-tech weapons because he wants to take over the world.
He is killing our economy to dominate and plunder the world. And if we attack the helpless, the poor, the different among us we will be misplacing our anger and not get around to seeing who is the real danger.
Terri Schiavo's case is another 'ethics' test run, a public spectacle, an illustration to gauge how much of our American empathy for the weak among us is dead or dying. Remember MSNBC a few years ago was asking the public in a poll if torture was something "wrong" or not. Around that time MSNBC for a couple of days showed al Qaeda gassing puppies. I see a pattern here.
The Bush administration is again using the media as a mass psychological assessment tool, measuring the public's psychological willingness to accept torture as national policy. Abu Ghraib happened later, but there were no riots, nobody stormed the White House to keep the government from breaking the Geneva Conventions ... and this inaction on our part was seen by them as permission.
Can't you see the really disgusting fascist underpinnings of the Agenda to destroy American Empathy motivating this case to be in the spotlight? And the push for genocide upon the 'weak' -- it's eugenics. Rationalizing the war on the weak, the disabled, with a spectacle.
The underlying question they ask is: Is it OK or not to kill off useless eaters like Terri? Is it OK to get rid of useless eaters ... or not?
Tell me, who is a useless eater? Where do you draw the line? Brain-dead, crippled, retarded, mentally ill, poor, gay, black, fat people? Come on, throw away your sentimentality. Who would you target? Survival of the fittest in nature would have Schiavo dead... and nature is no moral wussy. Riiight.
Funny how our empathy suddenly kicks in when it's personal. Like when it happens to ourselves, or to our loved ones. It's different when someone we care about is selected out of this life by the people who hate the weak ... and want to cut out the deadwood.
I think to myself, what monsters Americans are becoming in the name of efficiency. And I shudder. All because we let the sociopaths among us tell us how to suceeed. They lead us and give us their values ... and their exploitation, and abuse.
The Lorax bookends with the Lorax, after telling his story of why the forest was gone, and tossing a curious kid the very last truffala tree seed with instructions to plant a new truffala, treat it with care. Unless someone cares nothing will get better.
The Lorax had piled up a bunch of rocks in a ring, like a tombstone amongst the grickle grass with the word 'Unless' on it. He lifted himself by the seat of his pants and left through a hole in the smog-filled sky.
Terri, goodbye. And I will not close my eyes to suffering couched as mercy for the state.
I will plant the seeds you planted in my emotions and thoughts. I have no answers, but because I care, I write on the hopes the swimmy swans and barbaloot bears in all their diverse differences, inconvenient qualities will come back ... and be loved for who they are, someday, until they go in peace.
© by the author.
What do you think?
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Why all the rush to be rid of Terri?
Is it because she takes up space, drains bank accounts, uses up employee time, why?
What is so evil about her existence that it must end right now?
Kill the helpless, they are a drain on the economy!
The brain-dead must go, they aren't productive enough to live???!!
Productive for whom?
Her family loves her, enough to fight for her empty life.
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So many people are so concerned about Terri's quality of life they'll gladly starve her to death, unsure of whether she will feel pain or not, and call it "mercy".
They are so cocksure they will not get brain damage, they'll pass laws on her life that may come to interfere with their life if they should be disabled.
They may feel very differently when they are subjected to what they thought was mercy, when they were able-bodied.
But the unspoken side of all this is...
Terri takes up a room.
She drains bank accounts dry, she taxes her family's emotions.
Her life costs something.
Other people have to maintain her life for her.
The state helps her.
She takes up time, employees, space, and liquid feed, and all that a more able-brained person could use for their potential chance for recovery.
How much is Terri's life worth?
If she is starved, she has the status of a throwaway person.
A German Nazi victim.
She is helpless to say No, don't kill me.
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Is it OK or not to kill off useless eaters like Terri?
Is it OK to get rid of useless eaters ... or not?
Tell me, who is a useless eater?
Where do you draw the line?
Brain-dead, crippled, retarded, mentally ill, poor, gay, black, fat people?
Come on, throw away your sentimentality. Who would you target?
Survival of the fittest in nature would have Schiavo dead... and nature is no moral wussy.
Riiight.
Funny how our empathy suddenly kicks in when it's personal.
Like when it happens to ourselves, or to our loved ones.
It's different when someone we care about is selected out of this life by the people who hate the weak ... and want to cut out the deadwood.
I think to myself, what monsters Americans are becoming in the name of efficiency.
And I shudder.
All because we let the sociopaths among us tell us how to suceeed.
They lead us and give us their values ... and their exploitation, and abuse.
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